the last f/stop

South West of Dallas is the Cedar Ridge Preserve, a very large nature park with several great wooded trails, streams, overlooks, and a lake. I have a vision to spend more time doing scenic shots this winter when the street shooting is pretty much non existent, so I went down to shoot over the weekend. I brought my Mamiya m645 and the Bessa R with Ektar 100 in the 645 with some Arista 400 in backup, and some orthochromatic film I picked up at a swapmeet (I should probably write another blog post about that). I normally dislike photographing in wooded areas. I find that because they're so well shaded, the scenes are often very low dynamic range and I find it hard to compose interesting shots. Sadly, this outing was no exception. I really had high hopes for the scenic lookouts, which did yield a bit of interest but because the day turned out to be mostly overcast, there was a lack of punch I was really hoping for.    The first few frames on the m645 were lackluster as expected, b...

 I spend a lot of time just window shopping on Facebook marketplace for stuff I don't need. Usually for stuff I really can't afford at normal prices just on the off chance I find a deal. I've been pretty lucky a few times doing this.  On this fateful night, I was searching for "Mamiya." I have not really been super driven to get another medium format camera after selling my Yashicaflex especially since I have so much 35mm film on hand. I did, however, concede that if I were to ever go back to medium format, it'd be for something that isn't square (645, 6x7 being the top choices). So here I was searching just to see, and there it was: a Mamiya m645 with 2 lenses (150mm f4, 55mm f2.8) and a CdS prism eye-level finder....for just $300. I knew this was a pretty decent deal, especially with 2 lenses. But as I wasn't really shopping to buy, I just saved the listing for later, fully expecting it to be sold soon.  And then it happened. I shared the link in dis...